THE SEXES

THE SEXES; Pages Of Their Own?

By Betsy Israel

Published: October 3, 1993

DEEP inside a Trump Tower suite, from behind a desk the size of a city sidewalk, Steven Hoffenberg, debt-collection magnate and fledgling publisher, held forth about Women and Journalism.

"The New York Post is wrong about women," he said as he put several incoming calls on hold. "You put a picture of a dead body on the cover? Disgusting! Women stop buying your paper."

"Now a guy comes in through the sports pages," said Mr. Hoffenberg, who for several days owned The New York Post, "but a woman in this town has no voice. So we are giving her one."

What he gave women last week was Her New York, the first daily tabloid exclusively for working women in the New York City area: the debut cover features a large color photo of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is referred to always as "Hillary," just as Donna E. Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, is referred to as "Donna." Inside are news stories and commentary -- "Women Talking NAFTA (Here's Why We Hafta')" -- as well as a self-defense column by Lisa Sliwa of the Guardian Angels; etiquette and romantic advice from Sidney Biddle Barrows, the former madam; a television critic who revels in using the word "penis," and a horoscope (although it's not every horoscope that cautions readers to take their Femiron).

Her New York is also the latest, and most sweeping, resurrection of what used to be known as the women's pages, and it has helped to rekindle the old back-pages debate: Do women really need a separate press? Or shouldn't editors treat women as if 51 percent of the population were not a "minority concern"?

"There's no way that any tabloid can survive if it doesn't get women to read it," said Pete Hamill, who was briefly, under Mr. Hoffenberg, the editor of The Post. "And the in-your-face Post style doesn't always draw women. So this could work. But then you have the problem, which is, if you make it a women's section, or a woman's paper, and you include all the food and fashion stuff, are you in effect recreating the ghetto?"

The "ghetto," that once-obligatory stretch of casseroles and brides, seems to be undergoing a recipe-free restoration in cities outside New York. Following the success of Womanews, The Chicago Tribune's two-year-old Sunday section, papers in Dallas, Cleveland and Albuquerque, N.M., among others, have reinstituted Her or You or Woman, each filled with news (female lawmakers, abortion-rights updates), profiles (of women) and health, child-care and fashion features.

"Womanews grew out of focus groups, from women readers telling us they wanted more about themselves and that they wanted it all in one place," said its creator, Colleen Dishon, a senior editor at The Tribune who is credited, paradoxically, with dismantling old-style women's sections at The Milwaukee Sentinel and The Chicago Daily News. "And it came from my own sense of a growing need. We have a lot of smart young women here, and there was an endless stream of them into my office, each of them just having to talk about this terrible pressure -- having a serious job and kids and husbands. And they all thought they were alone."

But no matter how well intentioned or lucrative (advertising revenues for Womanews have tripled in two years), these sections have raised issues seemingly resolved 20 years ago. Call it the "herd or merge" argument or the "intergrationist versus mainstream" debate. Whatever. It's time to consider again the long and soggy history of women's news, or as Kay Mills, a former Los Angeles Times editor, defined it in "A Place in the News" (Columbia University Press, 1990): "Hard news is news about foreign policy, the Federal deficit, bank robberies. Historically men's staff. The right stuff. Soft news is . . . women's stuff."

Originally, there was only "men's stuff." In the country's earliest papers women's news typically rated a column. Then, in the mid-19th century, as papers began competing more intensely for advertisers, the column -- usually coverage of club meetings and the like -- became a page.

It is not inaccurate to say that for a century little changed.

"When I came to The Times in 1955, the women's realm -- what was considered relevant to women -- was what we called '4F': Food, Fashions, Family, Furnishings," said Nan Robertson, a ormer New York Times reporter and the author of "The Girls in the Balcony" (Random House, 1992). (The title refers to the balcony at the National Press Club in Washington, where, until 1971, women were exiled.) "It didn't matter that I'd just come back from seven years in Europe as a general correspondent," she continued. "There I was covering fashion!"

Others like her spent years writing up what debutantes had on or what this week's clever homemaker had in her oven. "You actually hoped for the 'woman who murdered her husband'!" Ms. Dishon said. "Women's was the absolute backwater. Once, when I'd moved out, I asked my editor on The Columbus Dispatch if I could transfer to the women's desk because I thought I could fix it. He said: 'Why? You're too good.' "